Depressing: Ray Bradbury Hates The World Today

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Maybe I’m expecting too much of Ray Bradbury; he is, after all, about to turn 90 on August 22nd, and therefore can be allowed to be slightly uncertain about the way that the world today has turned out. But there’s really something dispiriting about the curmudgeonly portrait of the Farenheit 451 author from the LA Times, which includes the following quotes:

I think our country is in need of a revolution… There is too much government today. We’ve  got to remember the government should be by the people, of the people and for the people.

We have too many cellphones. We’ve got too many Internets. We have got to get rid of those machines. We have too many machines now.

I was approached three times during the last year by Internet companies wanting to put my books [on electronic reading devices]. I said to Yahoo ‘Prick up your ears and go to hell.’

I’ll give him his complaint against Barack Obama (“He should be announcing that we should go back to the moon… We should never have left there. We should go to the moon and prepare a base to fire a rocket off to Mars and then go to Mars and colonize Mars. Then when we do that, we will live forever.”), but everything else…? When did Bradbury become such… well, such an old man?

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